The Des Moines Register did everything wrong this week. It all stinks — from how the paper’s hit piece targeting a local hero was prepared, to what was allowed to go to print, to its initial response to the furor over the article, all the way to its decision this week to pin all of the blame on and fire the report’s author.
It is rare to get this much wrong with a single story, but the Register seems to be a special publication.
We have “heard from hundreds of people in the past few days upset over our handling of a story on Carson King, the 24-year-old whose Busch Light sign on ESPN’s College GameDay launched more than a million dollars in donations to an Iowa children’s hospital,” executive editor Carol Hunter said in a second note to readers. “[W]e hear you: You’re angry, you’re disappointed, and you want us to understand that.”
She continues, again revising history to obscure the fact that the Register was the prime mover in this particularly stupid episode. Everything that happened this week, including the press conference where King apologized for tweets he disseminated as a high school sophomore, occurred because of their intrusive reporting into an otherwise-private person’s life. Hunter also goes through a lot of effort justifying spelunking through private citizens’ social media accounts and explaining why dredging up five-, eight-, and even 10-year-old tweets, written by people who were teenagers at the time, is actually in the public interest.
Worse, however, than these weaselly attempts to absolve her employer, is what comes next.
“[W]e’re revising our policies and practices, including those that did not uncover our own reporter’s past inappropriate social media postings,” she writes, adding casually, “That reporter is no longer with the Register.”
No, no, and no.
To answer one person’s cancellation with another’s may seem satisfying. The energetic hypocrisy of the reporter in question might make him the sort of person against whom you would like to see revenge taken. But resist the urge. This is not the right answer. Singling people out for punishment over problematic behavior is what got us here in the first place. And besides, this issue was reportedly hashed over by a team of editors. Why should the reporter be alone in taking the fall?
Yes, there is a difference between the two cancellations. King’s tweets were from when he was 16, whereas the tweets that supposedly got reporter Aaron Calvin fired were actually written when he was already an adult and an employee of the Register. Still, it is impossible not to see Calvin as the paper’s sacrificial lamb, especially considering how much heat it was getting because of his report.
The Register had a chance to learn from its mistake. It could have accepted Calvin’s public apology for his bad tweets, which were uncovered almost immediately after his hit piece on King was published, and everyone could have gone about their business as before. The Register could have made a good example of Calvin, showing that we should embrace and promote contrition rather than vengeance.
Nope! No such luck. The paper appears to have learned nothing from this episode and chose instead to fire Calvin — who, by the way, was failed spectacularly by his presumably more experienced, mature, and still-employed editors.
With King losing his Busch Light sponsorship over bad tweets, and Calvin losing his job for the same, this may be the first murder-suicide of the cancel-culture war, as political commentator Liam Donovan put it.
